How many " pre-prepared" things do you buy?

As much as possible. I have no desire to spend longer in the kitchen than necessary. Ingredients are important though and we don't buy ready meals any more. It's mainly fresh or frozen stuff used to cook from scratch.

We love cheese and buy grated cheese, cheese slices (not plastic cheese) and blocks of cheese. All have their uses. Don't buy pre-prepared mash because we rarely eat it, but I do have a tub of Smash in cupboard just in case.

Not a lot,have store cupboard jars on standbye for OH and E...but mash fresh or frozen is useful and sometimes frozen peppers/onions and mushrooms....try to make a fresh base of veg tomato/peppers etc and freeze as base of spag bols curries and casseroles using different flavourings/herbs as required.......sometimes am really lazy pizza is order of the day for when I really CBA .

Grated cheese, puff pastry (bog standard Jus-Rol, I think it tastes better than the all butter alternatives, and puffs up better!)hash browns (!), peas, cauliflower florets (great for a quick soup) spinach likewise, but I also particularly like frozen herbs in those little silver bags , garlic, parsley, coriander, chopped shallots, Italian herb mix and Thai spice mix. I freeze breadcrumbs, (when I remember) and always have a loaf of sliced white bread in the freezer. Fresh tomato sauce, parsley sauce and sometimes gravy or various stocks.

Puff pastry, frozen peas, green beans, sweet corn and broad beans. Cans of kidney beans and chick peas though I do still buy dried ones for if I'm cooking up a big pot of chilli or similar.

Frozen pastry, because it's easy, and chips. Most else I try to make as I really enjoy cooking.

Pastry, frozen peas, the odd jar of pasta sauce.

Don't consider frozen veg as pre- prepared but a ready meal well I do get the little pots of chilli with rice or pad thai for DH to take to work he gets cold at his place of work and a sandwich just doesn't cut it in the winter but at home no I make every thing from scratch especially when I found out about how much sugar there was in some of the sauces

All of the above, and more! Convenience food is a blessing, I love it. I do cook from scratch too - about 3 days a week I cook from scratch and the other 4 days are cobbled together from ready bought stuff - and I feel not in the least bit ashamed.

Waitrose haddock fillets in seed crust; and breaded hake fillets.

DH does the shopping so I have to cook from scratch. I like jusrol pastry as I think life's too short to make it and I tend to put leftovers together as a pie. D love to have more of the interesting ready meals. M&S do japanese and Thai as well as their usual Chinese Indian stuff. I do ask for a takeaway from their as a treat.

Hubby cooks everything from scratch. I'm trying to get him to get some ready prepared foods, especially when cooking for a crowd. I recently converted him to cauliflower cheese, and mashed potatoes when cooking for my daughter's birthday lunch.

I didn't mean stuff like frozen peas etc, but more stuff you could have made yourself. I had forgotten about pastry ( as I don't know anybody who still makes their own puff pastry!). I haven't made pastry in years.

Tea bags! The obvious one.

Would you include tinned steak to make a pie?

Probably would, Jinglebells, but as long as it tasted good, I wouldn't care!

Oohhh, that reminds me of Frey Bentos Steak and Kidney pies.....haven't had one for years!

I might pop one of those on the shopping list now and again. They are sooo high fat and sooo delicious.

M and S do nice tinned steak and tinned mince.

Because he works in the Co-op DH does the shopping. He sometimes brings roast potatoes in goose fat ready just to heat. I frown upon ready chopped vegetables, so he's stopped bringing those. We do have grated cheddar though, as these days the cheese goes mouldy if we have a block, as we don't eat as much as we used to. Yesterday we had a pre prepared cheese pasta dish. When he retires in the summer, we will not be getting so much, I think.

I have a tasty fruit crumble in the oven at the moment - tin of fruit filling and sprinkle-on crumble from a packet. (A rare treat)
I'm fond of preprepared roasting veg, also prechopped veg for soup or just to steam and eat with a dollop of Smash.
Linda McCartney fake meat pies and sausages are good.

Annsixty's comment yesterday made me smile, and could apply to me too: 'Very little. I'm too tight.'

Battered fish, breadcrumbed chicken fillets, pizzas, the occasional frozen dessert, and that's about it, though like several others, I'm not counting things like frozen peas or tins of veg, because I just see them as being preserved, not prepared. Anyway, my freezer is always packed with fruit and veg that I've grown and prepared myself.

I always make my own Yorkshire puddings, partly because we normally eat them with a roast or similar, and I use some of the batter to thicken the gravy because we really like the flavour it adds. Sometimes, I will make an extra big batch of them and freeze the extras for another meal.

I didn't know that Mrs Patmore had brought out her own Yorkshire puddings, I must look out for those! I could just bake myself one (or two) as DH isn't keen.

If we include frozen veg, what about all the veg I crop from the garden, pre-process and freeze for the winter. I currently have pre-prepared, but not bought apples, blackberries, plums, rhubarb, gooseberries, parnsips, runner beans, red cabbage and broad beans in my freezer

If I am tired after sorting out Mum or from a days walking or even CBA I have no compunction about getting either a ready meal from Waitrose or M&S or a takeaway. Life's too short etc. The rest of the time I use hardly any processed food at all.

Frozen veg, Yorkshire puds, ready cooked rice, some ready meals as we're both still working and on stressful long days I don't have time to cook before he gets home or we'd be eating too late. I am more careful about the quality and ingredients in prepared food these days and having just watched the Sugar Farm programme a bit paranoid about the sugar content. I never bake but we don't eat cake and pastries anyway so don't buy pastry. My parents cooked everything from scratch every day - they'd run a hotel so my dad did a lot of the cooking and I think they baked just to give them something to do. I sometimes feel bad about not cooking every day - considering I went to catering college it's not through lack of knowledge